Initiative
SDoH Transformation
Making the response to patients’ social needs part of clinical care rather than something that happens beside it.
The challenge
Emergency departments already ask about social needs. Housing, hygiene, food and transportation insecurity get screened, recorded, and then handed to a volunteer donation closet that the clinical system cannot see: no order, no tracking, no record that anything was delivered.
So the need is known and the help exists, but the two are joined by hand — and nothing about it reaches the chart.
What we’re building
ED Care Closet, the first project under this initiative, is a working prototype that turns that closet into a clinical workflow: a screening result qualifies a patient for a kit, a nurse orders it, a volunteer picks and scans it, the delivery is confirmed, and the intervention is written back to the record as a completed procedure.
It is built FHIR-native on HL7 FHIR R4 and designed to be SMART-on-FHIR compatible, so the same workflow can move onto Epic or another EHR without being rebuilt. Patient, Encounter and Observation carry the clinical context and the screening result; ServiceRequest carries the order; Task carries the volunteer’s work; Procedure carries the documentation back.
Screening to qualification
A configurable rules engine reads SDOH screening results — housing, hygiene, food and transportation insecurity — and determines which intervention kits a patient qualifies for.
Ordering and fulfillment
Nurses order from the patient’s context; volunteers work a task queue, scan the physical kit by barcode, and confirm delivery.
Inventory
Stock levels, low-stock alerts and barcode generation for the kits themselves.
EHR integration
Standard FHIR R4 resources throughout, with writeback so a delivered kit appears in the record as a documented intervention.
Operational analytics
Fulfillment times, kit distribution and the audit trail behind both.
Intended audience
Emergency department staff who screen for social needs, and the volunteers who fulfil what gets ordered.
The hospitals and health systems that want the response to those needs documented in the record rather than tracked on paper beside it.
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